25 February 2017Frankfurt GroupOne of the thinkers to whom the soul of the Frankfurt Group (School) is attributed is a man called György Lukács. He was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher and a philosopher of Leninist strategy but shifted the Marxist method to focus on the cultural attributes. He fomented and agitated for the creation of subversive programs to be operated after the success of the military principle of Marxist Revolution.
His compadre Antonio Gramsci believed that a “new” person must be ‘culturally’ created before a Marxist socialist state could succeed. His focus was on the fields of education and media.
Lukács believed that existing cultural norms had to be destroyed in order to replace them with something new. He said :
“I saw the revolutionary destruction of society as the one and only solution to the cultural contradictions of the epoch…. Such a worldwide overturning of values cannot take place without the annihilation of the old values and the creation of new ones by the revolutionaries.”
Sanctifying such an inner need to control others comes through the Tikkun loam which gives licence for those who hold this, as a divine right to destroy your culture.
Together, they founded the Frankfurt Group network.
György Lukács
Lukács ideas along with those of Kant, Hegel, Marx, Freud, and Weber provided the main protagonists with the theology for what they claimed was a move to learn from and synthesise the works of such varied thinkers.
The term “Frankfurt School” arose informally to describe those affiliated or merely associated with the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. The Institute for Social Research (Institut für Sozialforschung) was founded in 1923 by Carl Grünberg, a Marxist legal and political professor at the University of Vienna, as an adjunct of the University of Frankfurt; it was the first Marxist-oriented research centre affiliated with a major German university. However, the school can trace its earliest roots back to Felix Weil, who used money from his father’s grain business to finance the Institute. The real financial power behind the group was the American Jewish Committee.
The Frankfurt School which focused on what they termed Critical Theory which was a combination of Marxist analysis with Freudian psychoanalysis. In other words they looked at existing European cultural elements and looked to how they could attack them to undermine and destroy them, using the population itself. Classed as Gentile, the European masses were seen as sub-human and therefore must be herded into line.
As the theories took root, especially so with those under the influence of psychedelics, the theories became manifest as the hippies attacked every facet of what was their heritage; Christianity, capitalism, civil authority, the family, patriarchy, hierarchy, morality, tradition, sexual restraint, loyalty, patriotism, nationalism, heredity, ethnocentrism, convention, and conservatism.
Critical Theorists recognised that traditional beliefs and the existing social structure would have to be destroyed and then replaced with a “new thinking” that would become as much a part of elementary consciousness as the old one had been. And of course the ‘new thinking’ would be dished out by pop stars, the movies, the radio and television.
Involved in the ethos of the Frankfurt School included :
(Theodor W. Adorno [Tavistock Institute] was the brains behind the ‘Beatles’ and Floyd and he held the rights to all the music passed off as belonging to the Beatles, eventually his estate sold those rights to Michael Jackson.)
Friedrich Pollock
Otto Kirchheimer
Leo Löwenthal
Franz Leopold Neumann
Henryk Grossman
Associated with the Institute or its theorists include :
Siegfried Kracauer
Alfred Sohn-Rethel
Walter Benjamin
Later theorists with roots in Frankfurt School critical theory include :
Jürgen Habermas
Claus Offe
Axel Honneth
Oskar Negt
Alfred Schmidt
Albrecht Wellmer
Lukács also influenced :
The Frankfurt School, The Praxis School, The Budapest School, Walter Benjamin, Lucien Goldmann, Imre Lakatos, Karl Polanyi, Guy Debord, Tom Rockmore, Moishe Postone, Richard D. Wolff, Costanzo Preve, Leszek Kołakowski, Karel Kosík, and Fredric Jameson.
Lord Bertrand Russell worked with the Frankfurt School and also with the Macy Group. With the existing NGOs they were given the green card to completely change the culture of the United States. This was the case throughout the Western Nations including Russia as the post war populations, traumatised for a second time within 35 years, were ripe to have a new way to think and behave inflicted upon them through the expansion of the radio networks and especially so with the introduction of the television. Russell oversaw the change in social and cultural norms producing abortion, debauchery and the destruction of the family as a new and acceptable foundation for a healthy society. His specialist arena would be in techniques of psychology. In the 1950s he wrote in the Impact of Science on Society :
“Physiology and Psychology afford fields for scientific technique which still await development to great men. [Citing Pavlov and Freud ] They have laid the foundation. I do not accept the view they are in any essential conflict, but what structure will be built on their foundations is still in doubt. I think the subject that will be of the most importance politically, is mass psychology. Its importance has been enormously increased by the growth of modern methods of propaganda of these the most influential is what is called education. Religion plays a part though a diminishing one, the press the cinema and the radio play an increasing part. It maybe hoped that in time anybody will be able to persuade anybody of anything, if you can catch the patient young, and is provided by the state with money and equipment. The subject will make great strides when its taken up by scientists under a scientific dictatorship. The social psychologists of the future will have a number of classes of school children in whom they will try different methods of producing an unshakable conviction that snow is black. Various results will soon be arrived at that :
1 the influence of home is obstructive (destruction of the family unit)
2 not much can be done unless indoctrination begins before the age of ten
3 verses set to music and repeatedly intoned are very effective (1960s counterculture)
4 opinion that snow is white must be held to show a morbid taste for eccentricity but I anticipate its for the future scientists to make these maxims precise and discover how much it costs per head to make children believe snow is black and how much less it would cost for them to believe snow is dark grey.
Although the science will be diligently studied it will be rigidly confined to the governing class. The populace will not be allowed to know how their convictions were generated. Every government thats been in charge of education for a generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need for armies of policeman.”
From the studies they developed sociology and anthropology and other social structures that would remove rights and freedoms from the European gentile populations. The social structure they aimed to subvert was the morality of the Gospels. The authority claimed over those the deemed sub-human are subject to the dictates authorised by the elect, the rules they dish out are not the rules to which they themselves adhere. They hold humanity in contempt.
György Lukács in the early 1920s as the People’s Commissar for Education and Culture in Hungary, moved to subvert the morality of the populations to create a highly sexualised culture. He was beta testing his theories of culture and family subversion.
In essence they used what were established norms in the European cultures, and turned them against the same. Perhaps the greatest example of this strategy was in the aftermath of the Second World War when the guilt for the concentrations camps would be lay at the feet of the German people. From this achievement the same underlying force behind the Frankfurt School could act in all strata of global politics without the glare of the European populations. And if such did raise its head, the cry of Anti-Semite would be un-leashed.
The Frankfurt School Moved to America In 1933, when the Nazis came to power in Germany. Most of the thinkers came to the United States and many became influential in American universities, it’s headquarters at Columbia. Frankfurt’s “Critical Theory” became known as Cultural Marxism. The Coat of Arms for Columbia University.
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